After two years working with four localities to advance a range of transportation projects, ACEEE is releasing a toolkit—developed as part of that work—to help communities assess pedestrian safety and identify upgrades that support safe and walkable streets.
In many communities, poor pedestrian conditions prevent people from being able to access their daily needs without a personal vehicle. Busy streets without safe crosswalks, a lack of pedestrian signals, or poor nighttime lighting can contribute to an inaccessible or incomplete pedestrian network.
ACEEE developed a walk audit toolkit to help local communities work toward safer streets. During a walk audit, community members (often joined by local government officials) gather to walk along a roadway to observe and document the pedestrian experience, identifying ways to enhance safety and comfort.
By bringing people together for an intentional effort to audit the pedestrian conditions in a specific place, walk audits spur meaningful connections between residents and the planning, engineering, and policymaking professionals who dictate what type of street is built where.
Read the Case Studies ACEEE developed the toolkit as part of our work on expanding affordable transportation options in Lansing, Michigan; Lima, Ohio; St. Louis County, Missouri; and Sumter, South Carolina. New case studies highlight how each of the four communities improved transportation outcomes for its residents. ACEEE’s partnership with these localities was funded through the U.S. Department of Transportation Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Program.
Step-by-step toolkit can empower communities to take action on pedestrian safety
With step-by-step guidance and customizable templates, the ACEEE walk audit toolkit can be adapted to many local contexts to advance transportation projects that prioritize pedestrian safety. It gives users insight not only into planning and conducting successful walk audits but also into processing and analyzing the collected data effectively.
The ACEEE toolkit contains templates for observation forms to support three types of walk audits: audits of corridors, audits of intersections, and audits around schools. These single-page forms are designed to facilitate data collection in real time without requiring participants to shuffle multiple pieces of paper while engaged in the walk. The toolkit also provides best practice considerations for formatting the data to support long-term data analysis and geospatial mapping.
The ACEEE walk audit toolkit provides community members and local officials with a comprehensive guide on how to plan, execute, and follow up on a walk audit.
Federal funding can advance community-led pedestrian safety planning
Walk audits offer a unique chance to bring regular people into the early planning phase of transportation projects, helping ensure that important on-the-ground details about a neighborhood’s needs are not lost in top-down planning from an engineer’s desktop. In this way, walk audits can empower people to become proactive community advocates, taking the lead on identifying issues in a systematic, data-driven way while helping their neighbors better understand how local projects move from design to implementation.
The type of meaningful community involvement that walk audits can support is especially applicable in 2025, as many communities across the country are actively engaged in planning efforts focused on transportation safety. The Safe Streets and Roads for All (SS4A) federal funding program, introduced in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, provided $5 billion to fund planning and construction activities to reduce preventable deaths and serious injuries in the transportation system.
More than 1,600 communities, representing around 75% of the country’s population, have been awarded SS4A grants to advance safety planning and project implementation. SS4A planning grants fund the development of comprehensive safety action plans, which provide a targeted assessment and prioritization of safety needs and give communities a blueprint for action.
In Lima, Ohio, community leaders gathered with local officials in March 2025 to conduct a walk audit of Union Street using the ACEEE walk audit toolkit. The walk audit was organized in advance of Lima’s SS4A planning process, which will build on its findings. Image credit: City of Lima.
Since no desktop data source will be as rich as the insight collected during a walk audit, communities working on SS4A grant implementation should look to integrate this strategy into their planning processes. With around $980 million made available for continued support of these investments through the current round of the program, which is accepting applications until June 26, 2025, innovative and effective engagement strategies will continue to be crucial to guiding communities toward safer streets.
Residents and local officials can collaborate to create safer streets
As a part of ACEEE’s mission to support greater mobility and access for all through clean transportation modes like walking, biking, and public transit, we are invested in helping deliver the most impactful projects that meet local needs. We encourage residents and local officials to consider leading walk audits to enhance community engagement, improve transportation project design, and deliver projects that make communities safer and easier for all to navigate.
